Seite - 116 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 02/02

116 | Alexander D. Ornella www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 99–122 (sexual) objects to be instrumentalized for their own gain rather than as equals. Nigel, the lay reader in the parish, too, objectifies women and invents a girl- friend to hide his homosexuality. What, then, should we do with these different masculinities on screen? On the one hand, they are there, on screen, for us to enjoy. But on the other hand, they can be seen as speaking out of and to the sensibilities of contemporary culture. When writing the show, Tom Hollander interviewed vicars and ob- served services. While this does not qualify as academic research, it shows that television is entangled with real life on the level of content, production, and consumption. Through its pervasion of society, its both ephemeral and mate- rial nature, television is a contested site for the production and reproduction of society and culture. It is a discursive practice that links and organizes a range of social actors, viewing and fan practices, and online and offline social discours- es.50 It is a part of the ordinary, the normal, the everyday, but always also points beyond the ordinary. Stuart Hall argues that television needs to be understood as communicative process, and its production as an open circuit and a discursive practice that is framed throughout by meanings and ideas: knowledge-in-use concerning the rou- tines of production, historically defined technical skills, professional ideologies, insti- tutional knowledge, definitions and assumptions, assumptions about the audience and so on frame the constitution of the programme through this production struc- ture. Further, though the production structures of television originate the television discourse, they do not constitute a closed system. They draw topics, treatments, agendas, events, personnel, images of the audience, “definitions of the situation” from other sources and other discursive formations within the wider socio-cultural and political structure of which they are a differentiated part.51 The clerical masculinities we see in the BBC show Rev. (2010–2014), then, are as much a construction as their real-life counterparts, shaped by those they are intended to cater to, whether or not they want to render visible, disrupt, or subvert naturalized viewing patterns.52 To better understand the production process of Rev. (2010–2014), the way the show stages clerical masculinities on screen, and the issues it discusses, its cultural context and its cultural “prologue” need to be considered. In 2008 – and this seems to hold true to date – David Nixon argued that the questions the Church of England seems to concern itself with are: “Is it OK to be gay and a Christian? Is it OK to be gay and a priest? Is it OK to be gay and a bishop?” Nix- 50 Cf. Mittell 2001; Hartley 1999, 16, 29. 51 Hall 1999, 509. 52 For a discussion of the construction of TV masculinities cf., for example, Fiske 1987, 198.